If you have a personal or work email service that allows you to send and receive email, then why would anyone need to send messages via an Email Service Provider (ESP)? There are many people who have asked this question. Let's take a closer look at the differences between the two.
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Personal or work mailbox
It's really easy to send an email via your mailbox. It's a simple and convenient tool that has been developed for decades used to electronically transmit a message in moments. You want to send an email to a friend or a small group of coworkers? Done. Do you want to keep track of private conversations? Easy! Or maybe you'd like to send over a thousand marketing emails to your customers and keep track of how many opens and clicks you get? Stop!
While it IS possible to use your mailbox as a marketing tool, it hasn't really been designed to do so and might actually do you more harm than good. Emails sent in a bigger volume via common mailbox (eg. Gmail, Yahoo) may (and in most cases certainly will) land in the recipient's spam box. What's more, you won't be able to tell if any of your emails have been opened at all. Any additional tracking of sent emails may become additionally more complicated. There are also limits on how many emails can be sent at the same time, so delays are to be expected. This is where an Email Service Provider (ESP) comes to the rescue.
Email Service Provider
Each ESP is different and provides slightly different options, but they all share one goal: send multiple emails. It takes just a few easy steps to prepare a campaign for sending. These steps might include organizing your contacts into segmented lists, creating an email template, writing your subject line and then pressing send. Typically it would end there, but while using an ESP, you will be able to track how your campaign performs. Using an ESP you'll be able to view how many and which of your recipients actually opened your email along with any messages that bounced. But why just stop there?
An Email Service Provider offers you more than one way to enhance, track and improve your email messages. For example, knowing you can track opens and clicks, you now have the option to send a campaign to the most engaged contacts on your lists using list management tools. In addition, you can create an A/X split campaign which will tell you if any of your email templates perform better than another. Or, choose to separate some of your campaigns and send using a different 'from' address. Options are numerous and, as mentioned earlier, different with each Email Service Provider. In each case, you will find it easier to manage your email marketing (or transactional emails) using an ESP. rather than working within the limitations of a regular email inbox.
So, how about taking the first step? Go ahead, create an account with us and make your email campaigns more elastic!
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